How Buzzwords can Sting your Press Release’s Success

November 2, 2011

We touched on the use of cliches and prop words in an earlier post in the series (see Writer, Heal Thyself! 10/7/11) warning the press release writer or PR professional not to drop in buzzwords or the latest ‘hip’ phrase they have heard but things have become even worse in the press release world!A PR writer named Adam Sherk did some painstaking research recently and he came up with the top 100 most overused phrases in Press Releases and the results are quite surprising.

Leader is by far and away the most overused term, followed by Leading and Best. Unique features quite highly, as does Award Winning (with and without the hyphen), also Premier, Exclusive and Extensive. Real-time featured surprisingly high in the scale, probably because of the increasing proliferation of web sites and search engines, along with Fastest and Easy-to-use.

The solution to the Buzzword blues is an elegant and traditional one. The most popular online dictionary site, Dictionary.com, has a sister site called, unsurprisingly, Thesaurus.com. A Thesaurus isn’t an ancient Greek monster, it’s a dictionary of similes which can provide you with appropriate alternative words and phrases for ones you happen to be using. It initially takes some discipline to use one when writing your press releases, social media updates and blog posts but after a little while it will become as natural as using a spellchecker.

The results will be press releases that are more individual, more eye-catching and most importantly, won’t end up on any cliche lists anytime soon!